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T A B L E+T A L K

Searching for historical mysteries? Share your clues in the Books section of Table Talk.

F E A T U R E

The man who took sex out of the closet
By Scott McLemee
Alfred Kinsey outed America's sexual secrets -- while keeping a few of his own
(11/05/97)

R E C E N T L Y

Appetite for Life:
The Biography of Julia Child
By Noël Riley Fitch
Nonfiction
(11/07/97)

Close to the Bone
Memoirs of hurt, rage and desire
Edited by Laurie Stone
Nonfiction
(11/06/97)

Drawing Life
By David Gelernter
Nonfiction
(11/05/97)

Release 2.0: A Design for Living in the Digital Age
By Esther Dyson
Nonfiction
(11/04/97)

Speaking Truth to Power
By Anita Hill
Nonfiction
(11/03/97)

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336 PAGES

BY PETER KURTH | As the AIDS epidemic approaches the end of its second decade, a new kind of AIDS literature has begun to appear -- a fiction that seeks not just to absorb and comprehend the awful tragedy the disease has wrought in the lives of gay men in America, but to affirm it, to reclaim it in the name of its victims, to celebrate it, even. "We have all been upstaged by the newsworthiness of our particular disaster," Allan Gurganus writes in the prologue to "Plays Well with Others," his hilarious, overlong, but ultimately moving account of three young artists in Manhattan in the 1980s, a decade that began with such lustful promise and ended with so many corpses: "This is just one of the ways History snubs us."

"Plays Well with Others" is the memoir of one Hartley Mims Jr., an eager young talent from North Carolina, already in his early 30s when the novel begins, who aspires at first to be a painter but moves toward writing in fairly short order. In his mind, the line between one creative endeavor and another is almost completely blurred by ambition, sex, high spirits, good friends and the sheer throbbing energy of the magic city.

"For me, New York meant the chance of having fun while creating something true and beautiful," says Hartley, "a chance of lowering my address book's bucket into the deepest, coolest waters I could find." The image of Hartley's address book (or, rather, books, since he goes through nine or 10 of them as his friends begin to die) presides over the novel like the guest list of the "Titanic" -- a not incidental comparison, since Hartley's friend and heartthrob, the composer Robert Gustafson, is working on a "Titanic" symphony before, during and after his descent into AIDS. Robert is a breathtakingly beautiful Midwestern composer, "the greatest beauty of the 1970s Manhattan nights ... intensely popular at steam baths and in the backs of parked trucks along West Street where forthright boys passed fluids to and fro, past jets of spit and spunk, a secret virus riding all that liquid living pleasure." Neither Hartley as a narrator nor Gurganus as an author makes any kind of apology for the behaviors that led a whole generation of gay men to their doom.

"O, I long to tell a Fairy Tale," Gurganus cries. "It is a true one. Not to give away the end, but most of the best fairies die ... We were children. We thought no one had ever been wilder or smarter than we." That Gurganus is a "Southern" writer becomes almost painfully apparent as his tale progresses; I found the novel rather too thick with phrase, too self-consciously "playful." It's also too intent on crafting and shaping the thoughts and reactions of its characters -- not just Hartley, but Gustafson, too, and their wise, hard-as-nails, ex-debutante companion, painter Alabama Byrnes, whose "weird combination of garden-party girlishness and toad-collecting male-childness" serves as a predictable foil and mirror for the "fairies" at the heart of the story.

On the other hand, anyone who can write the simple declarative sentence "Thirty dildoes are a lot of dildoes" knows which side his book is buttered on. This is a wickedly funny novel, unsentimental, free of self-exculpation and determined to keep a bright face on things despite the subject matter. "Don't worry," says Hartley/Gurganus, "I can still be amusing. They always liked that in me."
Nov. 10, 1997

Peter Kurth is a writer and biographer who lives in Burlington, Vt.